The principal players are trying to fine tune their complex and complicated caste equations to ensure victory
Dharmendra Soni, the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) coordinator of the Aligarh region, was supremely confident that the BSP’s alliance with the Samajwadi Party (SP) would be more “productive” and “enduring” in 2019 than it was in 1993, when the BSP’s founder-president Kanshi Ram linked up with the SP chief Mulayam Singh Yadav to jointly fight the assembly election and defeat the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The raison d’etre was identical but Soni believed that the essence was not the same.
“The foundation of the earlier understanding was shaky, there was mutual distrust. Dalits regarded the SP’s Yadavs as land-grabbers and oppressors. The Yadavs thought of us as infra dig. The BJP exploited the cracks and took away the BSP. We now understand that the backward castes, scheduled castes and Muslims are natural allies, ‘shudras’ who were artfully divided by the upper castes to thwart a coalition. Mayawati (the BSP president) will fight for Dalits and Akhilesh Yadav (the SP head) will fight for the backward castes and together they will ensure that Muslims will be protected. See the contempt with which the BJP looks at Akhilesh. Once Akhilesh vacated the chief minister’s bungalow (in Lucknow after losing the 2017 elections), his successor (Yogi Adityanath) performed a ritual to cleanse the place because it was occupied by a backward caste person,” said Soni, who works out of Awagarh in Etah district.
To try and underscore that the Mayawati-Akhilesh re-union was not a one election partnership, Om Prakash Jatav, a BSP worker also at Awagarh, said, “The BJP has earmarked a 10 percent quota for the upper castes but after the elections, the BSP and SP will launch an agitation to demand a 52 percent reservation slot for the backward castes and Dalits, equivalent to our population, and a caste census.”
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